you have to at least try

17 Aug, 2026

One of the most interesting facts about my life is that people ask me for advice.

Internally, it's one of the most perplexing phenomena I encounter. I barely clear my own hurdles on a day-to-day basis: forget the hurdles of others. The hardest problems in life are the ones you're not even aware you're solving. They make up a fair few of the ones I come across.

For a long time, I was the only member of my immediate social circle who wasn't pursuing a doctorate at Oxford. There are strains and stresses unique to that situation which merit explaining. For one thing, envying the pursuit of doctoral studies at Oxford is definitionally the shallowest form of social exclusion. You are countenancing the niche and nebulous academic exploration of the world's most abstract topics at the world's premier (and second-oldest) institution of higher education in the world. Do you hear that? It's the sound of the world's smallest violin. You have the time, energy, and pettiness to obsess over a lifestyle only a small, elite minority can even contemplate. Bully for you. Find a real problem.

But there is something strange about being solicited for advice despite falling (ostensibly) the lowest on the academic and intellectual ladder amongst your friends and colleagues. In many senses, you are the failure case. You are the example of what not to do, the cautionary tale told at the water cooler. "Some people don't make it. Best if it's not you."

Regardless, people expected to be scared witless by that cautionary tale — the cautionary tale of me, me, me — make up a big fraction of those who ask me what it's like in my head. What do I do when I wake up in the morning? How do I study? How do I learn? I always land on the same piece of advice:

You have to at least try.

There's no magic to getting papers published, getting into a doctoral programme, learning an instrument, learning to code, coming up with ideas — it's actually pretty straightforward, in theory, when it comes to identifying what needs to be done. You need to do things, and you need to at least try to do those things. You need to start at Step 1, make your way to Step 2, and rinse and repeat until you get to Step The Last. It's easy to understand but hard to do. That's the first and last piece of advice I give anyone when they ask. How did you learn guitar? By starting and not giving up when it got hard. Physics and math? Starting, and maintaining the push even when I thought my world was collapsing and everyone around me was twice as smart as me and I was just an ape 200,000 years further behind the intellectual evolutionary track. And so on. Hard things are hard; they take time, they take dedication, and they take perseverance — especially when things seem impossible. Otherwise they'd be easy.

Most people are paralysed somewhere between Step 0 and Step 1. This is in pursuit of The Project — what The Project looks like, precisely, is different for each of us.

About 50% of people I know never make it to Step 1; I've spent a lot of my life in this category, too. That's fine — there are upsides and downsides to that — and it depends on what you want from life.

Advantages to Sticking to Step 0 (50% of people)

• No chance of wasting effort / expending energy unnecessarily, because no effort will be done. You won't ever have to worry about trying something for 18 months just to find out it doesn't work.
• Flexibility. No chance of committing to something you'll eventually realise you hate. This applies as much to doctoral programmes as it does to relationships, and is why many people in my generation have elected to remain single. No commitment means no entrapment.
• Free time. Could be a subcategory of flexibility, but just because you're flexible in terms of energy to allocate doesn't immediately guarantee free time. Flexible people might be too busy shuffling between things to have much free time. If you stay at Step 0, chances are you won't ever be deeply entangled in something, or obligated to contribute to some grander project. Life of leisure.
• A lot of people make it to Step 1, and a lot of them don't seem any happier for the change. In fact, a lot of them talk less, date less, and have deep purple rings beneath their eyes.
• Most people won't bug you for advice.

Disadvantages to Sticking to Step 0

• You will not endure. It's unlikely that you'll make art, music, poetry, code, math, or achieve something that will break through the immediate concentric circles of people that make up your life. No one will recognise you on the street, no one will ask for your autograph, and no one will remember you in 100 years.
• Self-actualization risk. There's a good chance that you will spend a lot of your life standing on Step 0 looking over and wondering what stopped you from making the move to Step 1. This may depress you or amuse you, depending on your maturity, your attitude towards life, and the quality of your immediate relationships.
• The world might have needed you. It's all well-and-good sticking to Step 0, but you might have had a spark, or an idea, or a drive that (with a little cultivation) might have helped the world. Whether that help would have been big or small is now anybody's guess. This can be thought of as a sin of omission or, instead, type II error.

So there are upsides and downsides. For the record, "sticking to step 0" doesn't mean "never do anything, ever". It doesn't mean you have no achievements or jobs or accolades. It simply means that there was no great project you worked on, no grand design you sketched for yourself, and life was mostly timetabled and organised for you by others. Maybe those "others" were parents, your boss, or your political party. Could be down to everyone.

Now for the next part:

Advantages to Getting to Step 1 (The Next ~49% of People)

• Once you start, it's easier to keep going. Clearing the first barrier and just making the first move gives you forward momentum which makes you harder to stop. Better yet, you may even like the feeling of moving forward.
• Ownership. You're more likely to be in a position to make calls and make decisions, because something in the world — a piece of software, a piece of music, a theorem — is now partially or wholly yours, and it's likely that other people will now depend on its completion or maintenance. The best part about this is you might even one day understand this thing better than anyone and become, dare I say, indispensable. Unique, even.
• You learn a lot. You won't get everything right the first time, but, hell, you pick up a lot of things just by trying. And a lot of the important points will stick with you and get you out of a jam (or seven) in the future. Every extra wrinkle in your brain is a good wrinkle.

Disadvantages to Getting to Step 1

• Depending on the goal, Step 1 might eat you alive. Making the first big move might take eighteen hours a day during the peak of your life, and it may never pay off. You may spend 19–27 working for something that doesn't materialise — through no fault of your own — and you'll be left wondering whether it might have been better to just live a little during those years, seeing how you'll never get them again.
• Project ownership doesn't mean life ownership. Just because you're working hard on The Project doesn't mean you get to keep control over your life; often, the inverse is true. People who relied on your time or energy will now find that time and energy divided and diverted to other things. You can't be everywhere for everyone all at once.
• Opportunity cost. Dedication requires time requires sacrifice requires dedication, etc., ad absurdum, ad nauseam. If you commit to something, you can't also commit to seventeen other things. Maybe one of those other things would have been a good call.
• Signalling risk. Perhaps a subcategory to Opportunity Cost. If you chose the wrong thing, or you went about the right thing in the wrong way, you risk giving the wrong message to the wrong people. If you'd just kept your mouth shut and your hands idle, you might have alienated fewer people, made fewer public mistakes, or wasted less money (whether it be your own, your family's, or a VC's startup capital). People might not take you seriously the next time round. This is called, variously, a sin of commission or a type I error.

So there are ups-and-downs to the Step 0 -> Step 1 tradeoff. That makes sense; there's no such thing as a free lunch. Taking a leap also means you risk not closing the gap, and sometimes you don't get a second crack at the jump. Life is finite, and if you sacrifice time or relationships for something, you can't always get them back.

But, say you did it, made it to Step 1, and now look at doing The Next Big Thing. That puts you in a very small minority — maybe fewer than 1% of people, myself excluded (I don't imagine I ever made it this far) — and, of course, there are

Advantages to Making it to Steps 2-Through-Last (<=1% of People)

• You made something and shipped it. You have effectively distilled yourself, or a piece of yourself, out there into the world. There is something out there, perhaps permanently, that bears your name and signature. You have a message — maybe even an oeuvre, and there's a good chance people will notice. People might write about you, plagiarise you, envy you, admire you — all are curses and blessings, in differing proportions, in their own ways.
• No self-actualisation risk. Even if there's no great payoff (and, if you really, truly made it to the last step, I doubt there will truly be no payoff, anywhere), it's difficult to kick yourself too hard for hard work. There is great value in the journey (which, cliche as it is, is often the destination) and, most importantly, you proved to yourself that you could do something very few people can — plan, pursue, execute. And you did it yourself.
• Contribution. Unless your plan was pouring metric tonnes of crude oil into the Amazon, chances are your assiduous and relentless pursuit of The Project contributed genuine knowledge, value, or insight that others can access, analyse, synthesise, and build upon. However modest or abstruse your work, you no longer sit at the Zero. You are a net positive for the world. Very few people truly are.

Disadvantages to Making it to Steps 2-Through-Last

• With great payoff comes great cost. Your gamble paid off, but maybe it was the tenth such gamble you made. Maybe you are a decade or two too old to feel great about how many years are in the rearview mirror, and how many people you might see back there, too. Compared to your friends, family, peers — how many smiles did you share? How much of the world did you see? Are there people and things you sacrificed that you can't get back?
• You're a junkie. A high-functioning, even respected, one, maybe. But there's a good chance that the thrill of the chase is something you now miss, and will now spend the rest of your life pursuing. Most people only release one White Album, and they may not realise they've peaked until the moment has passed. That can be one hell of a revelation, and comedowns come hard, fast, and remorseless. Perchance in expending your talent, you expended a little too much of yourself. And you don't have enough fuel in the tank to run the race again.
• Did you cheat? Making it to the end doesn't mean you did the right thing. Were there moments, breakthroughs, motifs, that were more "borrowed" than "invented"? Sure; we all stand on the shoulders of giants. But did you stand or stamp out? A lot of people steal, and it pays dividends in the moment, but you learn to regret it later. Case in point: Led Zeppelin, Mark Zuckerberg, Bernie Madoff. Their victims may not be household names, but their misdemeanours are. Did you build a castle or a house of cards?

Have we been exhaustive in our cost-benefit analysis of The Project? Certainty not. You can't formulate a full accounting for the full constellation of human ingenuity, iniquity and indolence in a hundred words or less. Especially not if you are a doctoral-dropout-has-been with an excess of ideas and a deficit of ability. But even if ten, a hundred, a thousand people are laughing at me right now, I guarantee you not a single one will have the patience to put their censure to paper. I tried, they didn't — Q.E.D. I may not be right, but at least I win.

When I was a young boy I spent my life alone. Inside or outside, living was a solitary activity. I cooked, cleaned, studied, practiced, grew up — all by myself. At thirteen I spent my Summer memorising hundreds of pages of half-legible prepubescent scrawl to memory. The Russian Civil War. The Nitrogen Cycle. Catalysis. I did this because I thought that, at the very end, at Step The Last, it would give my life some meaning. In the gaps between, I had a trick I'd use to fill up the spare time.

I had a little list on my wall, written on a tatty little sticky note which, over the months and years, however wrinkled and discoloured it became, remained stuck there, watchful, beneath my old analog TV. On the top, it said "Things to Do When I Get Bored" — go outside, cook, play guitar, play a game, read a book — but, try as I might, and in spite of that little sticky note's long lifetime on that old bedroom wall, I never took the list seriously. I never really looked at it. Because it felt disingenuous, wrong, fake. I realised many years later why that was. It was because I hadn't named it right. I hadn't called it what it was:

"Things to Do When I Am So, Very Lonely."